


She's the Charm

by cordsycords



Series: lies you tell your friends to prevent them from figuring out your depressing d&d backstory [4]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Campaign 02 (Critical Role), Divine Entities Have No Opinions About Illicit Substances, Drug Use, First Meetings, Gen, The Negative Side of Drugs, mentions of amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-12 21:12:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13555674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordsycords/pseuds/cordsycords
Summary: or Molly and Yasha bond through the use of illicit substances, and sometimes that doesn't always go as well as they would like it to.





	She's the Charm

There’s something going on at the carnival.

Which is not very odd in and of itself, there’s always something going on at the carnival. When you live and work with people who are as odd as his current compatriots, what other people view as extraordinary quickly becomes part of a boring life. So, when he wakes up early one day, keen on getting started on breakfast with Orna only to find that half of their food store has gone missing in the middle of the night, Mollymauk leaps at the chance to find a new definition of extraordinary.

Gustav, bless his occasional naivete, is quick to write off the stolen food as a random event. They’re between shows, traveling between cities, right in the middle of nowhere. They haven’t met anyone else on the road in days, it’s easier to say that the food was stolen away by some forest animals than some random stalker from out in the woods.

The days on the road are his worst. There’s only so much card-shuffling and sword-twirling practice one can do before they slowly go insane, and the Knot sisters are complaining about the heat, and Toya is still singing the same song that she’s been singing for the past fifteen months. His philosophy of living each day to its fullest is wasted when each day melds with the next like an endless string of wasted potential.

So he doesn’t go to sleep when the others do. He lies down in his bedroll with his eyes closed, focusing on only his hearing. Crickets, the wind through the branches, Bo’s loud snores, until the snap of a twig twitches at the edge of his perception. He slowly opens one eye, his body strategically placed so he can look directly at their food supply without making to much movement. He’s begrudgingly thankful of his fiendish heritage in the middle of the night when he can see the hulking figure of a wild-woman slowly make her way across the camp, stepping over the sleeping bodies with delicate ease despite the size of her form.

He watches her gather a sizeable amount of food in her arms and leave. He then waits for a minute, gets up from his bedroll, and begins to track her. While her interloping through their camp was done with discreteness, her getaway leaves something to be desired. He follows the path of a particularly deep footprint in a puddle of mud, to a trodden over sapling, to a piece of black leather, until he’s finally close enough to smell the burning embers of a brand new campfire.

He hadn’t planned on getting up to this point, so he does what he does best and improvises.

He saunters up, “You know, I always find it easier to ask people if they’ll share their food with me before stealing it, never liked myself a guilty conscious,” he sits down on the opposite side of the fire from her.

She pauses eating the piece of jerky in her hands for just a second to stare at him, then goes back to eating, entirely undisturbed by his moral preaching.

“I swear we don’t bite. Well, Bosun does, but only if you ask him to,” he smiles, showing off the peculiar sharpness of his front incisors.

She was neither annoyed, impressed, nor intimidated. She is, however, very hungry.

“Do you not speak?” He asks.

According to the pattern she’s set so far, she doesn’t answer.

He nods, continuing the conversation by himself, “I get that. Had a bout of muteness myself about a year back now. Those pesky words, they’re just so…”

“Annoying?” She mutters between bites.

“And she speaks! Care to tell me your name, friend?”

“Yasha, if that’ll make you stop talking.”

He shrugs, “Tried that already, I’m making up for all the lost time. Now, why did you steal our food, dear Yasha?”

“He told me I would be forgiven.”

“You hear voices too?”

“Only in dreams.” She finishes her meal, looking up to see him staring at her with his head tilted to the side, “What?”

“Those voices pointing you in any specific direction?”

“Not as of late.”

“So you wouldn’t say no if I asked you to travel with us, then.”

“Why?”

“Don’t have to steal our food, for one. The charming company, obviously. Gustav might even pay you if you have some skill to give in return.”

That perks her interest, “I am very strong.”

“Stronger than a half-orc?”

She lets out a huff of laughter, “Stronger than anything.”

He arrives back at the carnival the next day, his new friend in tow, “Morning everyone, hope you had a good night’s rest. This here’s my new friend Yasha. Trust me, she’s a charming one.”

 

 

 

Yasha tends to stick to what she knows, and what she knows is Mollymauk, so she sticks to him. Every trip into town to hand out fliers, she’s five steps behind him looking as intimidating as ever. What used to be the more than occasional heckle of insults and threats thrown his way disappear once he has his own version of an overprotective mother grizzly bear following him around. And if she’s going to join him on everything that makes life boring, then she might as well have some fun too.

“Keep your eye out for a herbalist, friend,” he tells her after he hands out the last flyer.

“Shouldn’t we be getting back?”

“Eh, probably. But we’ve been traveling for so long. Might as well enjoy the pleasures that small towns like this have to offer.”

“And we’ll find that a herbalist?”

He chuckles, “Oh, the things you’ll learn. Just watch and do what you're good at. Leave the talking to me.”

It takes twenty minutes to find a shop that’s suitable for his needs. He walks in with as much flourish as he can muster, and gets what he wants in no time at all. For the rest of the day, he wanders around town with a small bag of dried leaves sitting in a pocket that’s been sewed into the liner of his robes.

They sequester themselves in the caravan for the night, gleefully kicking out the Knot sisters back to the tent they’re supposed to be sharing with Orna. He’s rocking in the hammock, packing the leaves into the pipe with unceasingly still fingers. Yasha watches from the other side of the caravan. She’s sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, legs straight out in front of her.

“Mollymauk,” she begins, hesitantly.

“One second, friend.”

“I’ve never done this before.”

“I guessed. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, though I’d appreciate your company nevertheless.”

“Hm.”

When he’s done packing in the leaves he grabs one of the many candles in the rooms and lights the pipe. He takes a long breath, holding it in his lungs before he breathes out from his nose, smoke billowing out of nostrils evoking the image of his fiendish ancestry. He holds the pipe out to Yasha, “So, what’s your voice saying about this?”

“He doesn’t have an opinion on illicit substances.”

He can’t help it, he giggles. The drug works quick. His muscles relax in a violent wave from head to toe, and suddenly he can’t hold his arms up anymore. They dangle at the sides of the hammock, his pipe falls to the floor, and he laughs again.

He doesn’t notice Yasha as she grabs the pipe off the floor, too engrossed with the rush of sensations, memories, and unconscious thought flooding his mind. He hears a cough and a sudden thump and turns to see Yasha collapsed onto the floor, a dazed smiled playing at the corner of her lips. Her pupils are blown wide, and he knows that if he had pupils he probably would look the same. Which is funny, so he starts laughing again; a resounding cackle that echoes into the night.

“How d’you feel, Yasha?” He slurs.

“Fucking divine,” she states in a state of utter bliss, rolling on her back so that she’s staring at the ceiling of the caravan.

It’s the funniest thing he’s heard all night.

 

 

 

It becomes a sort of ritual, the two of them getting high. Whenever the town is boring enough and he can scrape up enough coin for a psychedelic experience he works his magic and finds something for them to delightfully abuse.

It’s a good time, until it isn’t.

The current town they’re in really is the bumfuck of nowhere. Which means that there’s more room for experimentation when trade is slow and intelligent people are bored. He buys a work-in-progress substance from the daughter of the town’s herbalist while her mother is in the back room. He gives her an extra silver for her precociousness.

He’s done this enough that he’s used to the regular side-effects: the high, the general feeling of giddiness, and the memory rush. It’s an odd feeling, to remember something from before. He gets at most a feeling, the tiniest blip of pain or pleasure or delight from something that he’s never personally experienced, or at least hasn’t remembered it. It’s usually an annoyance, a side-effect of living life one day at a time.

He goes first. Snorts the stale-yellow powder and tilts his head back as it begins to settle.

It’s like a switch gets turned in his brain. What should be a euphoric high turns immediately into a shrieking pain that starts at the tail of his spine and spreads like cracks across his skin until it paralyzes him. He collapses to the floor of the caravan, limbs quaking as he attempts to breathe. He wants to open his mouth and scream but no noise comes out.

“Molly!” Yasha shouts as she kneels down in front of him. It sounds like he’s underwater as his vision goes blurry. Yellow and purple merge together as tears fall unbidden from his eyes.

He falls unconscious to the feeling of her hand on his cheek, no doubt calm and gentle yet it somehow feels like a slap to the face.

He wakes up in her arms, his back being supported by her body from her spot sitting against the wall. He would normally refuse the contact, but it’s a very welcome and swaddling embrace so he finds himself cuddling closer. His robes are gone, and he stares through blurred vision down his legs to see purple toes wiggling against the wood floor.

“Where’re my boots?” He slurs, turning his head to the side. Yasha pulls him closer to her, placing her chin on top of his head.

“I took them off. You weren’t comfortable.”

“Was I out for long?”

“Long enough.”

He lets out a deprecating chortle, which hurts his throat and sends a sharp pain through his stomach. He ends up having a coughing fit, which hurts even more, and when he’s done he collapses against her once more.

“Yasha. I think something terrible happened to me once,” he confesses.

“No shit.”

He wants to laugh but stops himself in time. He lifts a hand up behind him, attempting to pat her on the head but flicking her in the forehead instead, “All charm, friend. All charm.”

**Author's Note:**

> I will fill up this tag with pure friendship if it kills me. Their official frienship name is now The Wicked and The Divine for taliesin jaffe-related reasons.
> 
>  
> 
> So this story is obviously inspired by the most recent episode where Mollymauk buys drugs, and Yasha does too so I thought hey might as well just make it a ThingTM. I also enjoyed Molly's little monologue in the middle of the ep where he says that he dresses that way and acts that way because he's just living his life and that's the way he wants to live it. So, if amnesia is a thing - which I totally think it is because at some point in the episode somebody mentions a nergoliid AND THEN MOLLY ASKS WHAT A NERGOLIID IS I SEE YOU TALIESIN JAFFE - then my current headcanon is that Molly in his first couple months with the circus was kinda wtf do i do with no memories but then he was like whatevs might as well get some cool tats and cool set of robes and throw caution to the wind.
> 
>  
> 
> Anyways, i hope you enjoyed this. Please comment and kudo, and if you ever have a headcanon that you would like to be fic'd, don't hesitate to drop an ask on my tumblr [cordsycords](http://www.cordsycords.tumblr.com).


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